If you somehow missed your email issue - or prefer to read it online - here is the latest Affiliate Classroom Weekly. Sign up here.
Affiliate Classroom Weekly
Read by 35,000 hard working affiliates each week.
Published by Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
Anik Singal, CEO and Founder
Quick Tip: Some Unfamiliar Terms Defined
An Affiliate Classroom student recently asked for definitions of some terms in the latest issue of our Magazine. Since many beginner affiliates may not be familiar with terms like “backlinks,” “organic results,” “ping,” or “upsell,” I posted the definitions here:
http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/24/some-questions-from-the-magazine/
Affiliate Marketing Product of the Year
Seems like every day a new marketing product hits the streets, doesn’t it? Most are so-so, some are useful. But a rare few are absolutely indispensible tools - especially for beginners who are new to the whole online marketing scene.
So this year our Affiliate Classroom consulting faculty got together with the staff of Affiliate Classroom Magazine to choose a Product of the Year. And I honestly don’t think they could have picked a more worthwhile tool - or a more versatile one.
To read our review of this outstanding piece of software, click here to download your copy of the January issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.
Recent Usability Studies Can Help You Choose Merchants
When it comes to choosing merchants, it’s important to promote programs that are likely to close sales - after all, if your merchant isn’t doing a good job of encouraging purchases, you won’t make any commissions!
On the Affiliate Classroom Magazine section of this blog, we’ve reported on some recent studies that can help you judge whether a merchant is encouraging your visitors to buy… or just confusing and distracting them. Check out these posts:
http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/18/youve-only-got-3-seconds/
http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2006/01/23/does-your-merchants-site-make-visitors-want-to-buy/
Remember This Case Study?
Those of you who are Affiliate Classroom students may remember a case study we featured in the private training area more than a year ago. We interviewed Stephanie Hetu, who had just fired her boss to be a full time affiliate marketer.
Stephanie went from having a website with no traffic at all to over 40,000 visitors a month - all from search engines. But you may also remember Stephanie’s little “horror story” about her first high traffic success:
“I received tons of traffic very quickly, but that traffic DROPPED dramatically 2 months later. I did not panic because I know already WHY this happened. But this is often what people do. They see a change in their traffic, they panic, and they start to change things on their site. This is the LAST thing to do!”
If you remember, Stephanie had some excellent advice about how to not only correct this situation, but avoid it in the future - all by using the one SEO strategy that will never fail you because it never upsets the search engines. It was great advice, and worth reviewing.
We also revisted Stephanie in June, 2005, to find out about a new strategy she was experimenting with - marketing in a foreign language. For those of you who are bi-lingual, you can learn a lot from Stephanie’s incredible success is this area.
If you’re not a member of Affiliate Classroom, click here because we’re still running our enormously popular Trial Offer.
Coalition Forms to Shine Cold Light of Day on Spyware Cheats
If you’re as incensed as I am at the spyware cheats who hijack your hard-earned commissions, here’s some good news. With funding from Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems, Harvard and Oxford Universities have teamed up to fight “badware” - spyware, adware, and parasiteware.
Click here to read all about the organization they’ve created: StopBadware.org.
Until next time,
Anik Singal